THE REAL THING
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Artist Descending a Staircase, for example, which is about modern artists and their experimentation with concepts of time and space, Stoppard experiments with time. The scenes in the first act run in reverse chronological order–characters start the act as old men and end it as schoolboys–but in the second act, they run in the correct order. Stoppard’s structure creates a kind of staircase of scenes, which in turn is a joke about Duchamp’s seminal painting Nude Descending a Staircase, to which Stoppard alludes in the title.
In The Real Thing, Stoppard constructs a different dramatic machine to explore yet another idea–the ever-tricky relation of art and reality. Its cousin theme is the equally difficult question of when love is “the real thing” and when it’s an illusion. Stoppard approaches these twin themes in a series of plays within plays, all concerned with sexuality and fidelity, that constantly interrupt the main story, about a clever playwright named Henry who leaves his wife for another woman, marries her, then suspects that his second wife may have a lover.
By contrast Kendall Marlowe’s Henry has a charming, boyish mischievousness about him that both contrasts with the character’s pedantic streak and gives him just enough distance from his problems to make him easy to laugh at (and with). Moira Brennan plays Henry’s second wife with the sort of bracing youthful energy and resilience that make you see immediately both why Henry desired her enough to wreck his first marriage and why he fears she’ll eventually leave him.
